Arguing on the Internet is like competing in the Special Olympics: even if you win, you're still retarded.

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About Me— I'm a third-generation computer geek. Well, sort of a generation 2.5 computer geek — the grandfather has certainly been more computer-inclined than most his age, though he doesn't qualify as any kind of geek by today's standards. Both parents have been working with computers for about as long as I've been alive. It's in my blood, I suppose. I'm even named after computer-generated confetti.

I first stumbled across Perl as a means of making webpages more functional. I then fell into Unix, and discovered there's far more to the pathologically eclectic rubbish lister than meets the average websurfer's eye. PerlMonks has helped motivate me to learn more.

I have been the WikiMedia Foundation's first paid employee, the network administrator for a company full of rocket scientists, and a writer of many articles for TechRepublic and some Pathfinder oleplaying Game materials for a British publisher.

Sometimes, I'm not so good at this "user bio" stuff. Obviously.

I sense a great disturbance in the Source, as though millions of bugs cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

My Philosophy— I jokingly call myself a Ferrotheist: I believe in an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Iron. I'll have to lay that out in more detail at some future time.

More seriously, I'm something of a Taoist, as regards metaphysics (that is to say, ontologically and epistemologically). I operate on default assumptions of an empiricist, for the most part — approaching the philosophical basis of Objectivism, in fact, though without any particular relation to the practical form of it practiced by people associated with the Ayn Rand Institute (who some call "randroids"). I don't believe the world is strictly as represented by the empirical so much as operate on that assumption simply because it makes sense to do so in absence of direct and verifiable evidence to the contrary.

Shakespeare was mistaken. The pun is the highest form of humor.

My Politics— I'm a libertarian. I don't mean that in the sense of "I vote for those pro-business guys" or anything along those lines. I'm not strictly "pro-business", though I believe in the efficacy and ethical validity of free markets (that is, voluntary economic individualism). Rather, my libertarian political philosophy arises from my belief in a well-ordered, logically derived system of ethics that simply states as its primary tenet that the initiation of coercive relationships is wrong. That statement is often referred to as the Non-Aggression Principle, or NAP, in libertarian circles.

The progression of ideas that arises naturally and logically from the NAP leads me to a belief in the unethicality of the "intellectual property" system in this country (the United States of America), in the unethical status of corporate law here, and in the unethicality of systems of wealth redistribution through coercive taxation. The part of all this that is most relevant to PerlMonks is probably the bit about intellectual property. While I have minor ethical quibbles with some of the dominant open source licenses, the ideas behind free and open source software development are more in line with what I consider to be ethical practice than the proprietary model of software development.

The Bible was a misprint. The geek shall inherit the earth.

My System of Ethics— I'm an ethical theorist. In fact, I'm more of an ethical theorist than I am most of the other things I say that I am, including:

ferrotheist

geek

gun owner

IT consultant

libertarian

logician

programmer (Do I really say I'm a programmer?)

Taoist

veteran

Being an ethical theorist means, among other things, that I have spent a lot of time thinking about ethical theory, and have a very in-depth, comprehensive understanding of what "valid system of ethics" really means. Part of being an ethical theorist involves being a logician, however, and one of the direct results of being an ethical theorist (for me, at least) is being a libertarian.

Don't ask me to justify my statements about what constitutes a valid system of ethics unless you really want to know, and at that point you should be prepared for a virtual earful, and have some other venue for discussion in mind besides PerlMonks. It might be considered bad form to turn a discussion in PerlMonks into a book-length dissertation on the subject of the logical origins of ethics (and even that would be a summary: I am literally writing a book on the subject of constructing a valid ethical system).

Except where text is quoted from material under other licenses or in the public domain, you can assume that (insofar as PerlMonks policy permits) everything I post in PerlMonks is distributed under the Open Works License.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other